Identification of coins, medals and banknotes; determining origin and date of minting.
Market valuation of single pieces or entire collections — for sale, inheritance or insurance.
Expert authentication of material by experienced numismatists.
Written expert opinions as required — for legal, court or internal purposes.
Representing clients in sales and purchases at auctions at home and abroad.
With coins, unlike other antiques, a coin that is 200 years old is still considered a fairly modern strike. Coins have been minted for over 2,000 years; the metal is durable, so an old coin is not hard to obtain, even at a reasonable price. We also sell such old Greek and Roman coins in our shop. The rule "the older, the more valuable" therefore does not apply.
The layman's assumption that gold coins are the rarest, and small bronze or copper ones the least valuable, does not hold. The metal only hints at which category a coin might fall into; the price is set mainly on the basis of other criteria.
As in other fields, with coins and banknotes the better the state of preservation, the higher the price. Even a very common coin in flawless condition is usually valued more than a rare coin in poor condition.
The rarity of coins, medals or banknotes is determined by the number of pieces struck and, above all, by the number that have survived and are available on the collector market. Clearly, where supply is large and collector demand small, the price is low; where supply is small and demand high, the price is high.
Further criteria seem unrelated to coins and other collectable material, yet they sometimes affect the price considerably. Chief among them are collector popularity and the economic situation of collectors and of the economy as a whole. The most collected coins are the most accessible and best known to us — coins of the Czech Republic and Czechoslovakia, and then coins that historically circulated in our territory. A common Franz Joseph coin sells better than, say, a rarer coin of Bolivia or Cameroon. It should also be noted that the popularity of collecting particular coins often shifts, and prices shift with it.
The price is set taking all five criteria above into account, drawing on many years of experience and regular monitoring of the collector market. The idea that you can simply buy a catalogue and find it there, or the naive notion that you can find it online, is entirely mistaken.
In general terms, valuable coins are those that are old, rare, very well preserved and in demand. Frankly, I have not seen many of those. The least valuable, by contrast, are common coins in poor condition that few collectors seek — and unfortunately these make up the majority. All other coins fall somewhere in between, and it is quite hard to weigh up every factor accurately even for an expert, let alone for a layman.
Here are a few of the most common coins that have survived in almost every family. You may well pass them on to a beginning collector.
Maria Theresa
Francis II
Franz Joseph I
Czechoslovakia
